yesterday

tulips

felt like summer

yeah!

photo by Lou Tickle from Flickr.com

You’re all set to begin your presentation. You’ve been introduced. Your past and present achievements have been checked off by the host. Goodness knows you are nervous and ready to plunge into your presentation, but taking one more, potentially risky, step can make all the difference in your success. What more needs to happen before you click the button for the first slide?

Take a moment to explain to your audience why you are passionate about the topic you’ve chosen. This may seem unnecessary because after all, the people in the room have come because you are the expert. But expertise is different from passion. Passion says, this is personal, this matters to me. When I can, I talk about where my passion for the topic comes from by telling a personal story.

We hear over and over that stories are necessary elements of a great presentation. And lo and behold, here’s an easy way to begin with a story. Tell a story that shows why you are so engaged with the topic. Why does this subject mean so much to you: because you have a brother with this particular disability; because you were born in the South – New England – new Delhi – where this notion is a way of life; because you blew up the basement with a science experiment when you were seven; because you are color blind – short – a red head. There is a story behind each of these – a story that can bind your audience to you and your topic before you’ve even started your presentation. If the connection is quirky, unexpected or funny, even better.

A second reason to begin by explaining your passion for the topic is that you are being open and authentic with your audience. You can prove your reliability and honesty quickly by being transparent and real in your opening remarks. Showing your passion goes way beyond talking about previous jobs, your pay grade,your job responsibilities. It helps to show that you have come to be of service to the audience and not to feed your ego. I believe it is much better that you come across as real than as perfect. It is better to have a couple flaws that the audience can relate to rather than a power-packed resume that makes the audience feel inferior. Talking about a few strike outs is better than boasting about a bunch of home runs to let the audience know that you have feet of clay, just like they do.
Never depend upon anyone introducing you to do more than give a list of your achievements. They can’t explain your passion and they aren’t doing to talk about any mistakes you’ve made along the way. Of course,make sure that you give the MC a resume to use for the facts. But nothing, nothing! substitutes for your story.

So, go for broke. Pull back the curtain and let your audience see the real you. It might even calm your jitters. It will certainly help you connect with your audience and take a bit of the chill off the room.

What do you think? Is this something you do? Have you found good stories to explain why you have a passion for your presentation topic?

Red Sunflower

I love this picture. I think what makes it so interesting is the out of focus background. Sure the flower is beautiful and it would make a nice photo on it’s own. But it’s that background that changes everything. My eye moves to the yellow spot and makes me wonder “what is it, what’s going on back there”. It opens up my imagination to all kinds of possibilities.

The essence of this picture depicts how to lure your audience in and get them engaged in your presentation or video. Use content that makes them think. Don’t spoon-feed them, let them figure things out for themselves. They’ll enjoy what you have to say much more. Keep them engaged with a sense of mystery.

Don't stray from the path you've chosen.

I confess that I don’t truly understand the meaning of geodetic north – aka true north – or that I even know how to use a compass, but I do understand that being off by even a few degrees when plotting your course can put you very far off course at the end. It is an important concept to understand as a presenter: find the place where you want to start and end your presentation and the direction in which you want to go to get there or risk ending up in the woods. What may seem to be only a minor deviation at the start will leave you miles from your intended goal at the end.

Take a moment to think about where you want to be at the end of your journey before you begin to reach for your compass. Think deeply about what you want your audience to feel, think or do when you are finished. Now aim for this target with every slide, every point. Think of every deviation from this goal as a point off the path you are charting. Often a veer off course starts a meander that leads you and your audience further from your true north. While it is a presenting cliché that slides are free and to use as many as you need to tell your story, this does not mean that you should start tossing slides into your presentation that aren’t directly on your path.

It is surprisingly difficult to keep to the narrow path especially if you are passionate about your topic. Every aspect of it seems essential to you. If you’re like me, your ideas are like beloved children – hard to leave out. But be respectful of your audience who is trying to follow you. Whether they know it consciously, as they listen, they are trying to understand the logic behind your choices in order to grasp your advice, remember your ideas, feel the way you told them they would. If you’ve told them you are taking them from A to B, why are we now at M? Is it important? Can you see how quickly this will first confuse, then frustrate and finally defeat your audience?

This honing process is not the same as getting rid of the extraneous information, of eliminating the chaff from your presentation. This is different. You must question your choices in a different way to be certain that you’ve kept to your true north. You must ask whether each slide, each point you make in your presentation delivers your audience closer to the outcome you’ve selected. Ask yourself: what does this slide deliver that makes it indispensable, what part of the goal does this deliver, do I make it clear that this an important step along the path?

So what do you think? Do think that finding a true north for your presentations would help you connect with your audience? Do you have a technique for finding your path through a presentation? Do any presentations come to mind where a lack of distinct and clear direction made it difficult to follow the presenter? I’d be grateful to hear your ideas.

Hey, what's so interesting?

Wow! Now I see. It's beautiful.

These pictures make me think of perspective and how it influences our relationships with our clients. When we first start working with clients we are in what we, at Imagine, call the “golden phase” of the relationship. Other than knowing the key players, we don’t know the office politics, the dynamics, nor much about the corporate culture. This gives us the ability to bring new and unfiltered ideas to the table. We are essentially “on the outside looking in”, seeing them as the world does. We’re careful to understand what we see and to keep an inventory of our observations.

As time goes by we start to learn the inside scoop, so to speak. And this is necessary, because when we’re creating an e-learning course, a high-stakes presentation, or a video we need to become fully aware of the content, as well as the teaching styles of our clients. In fact, it’s so important to us, we learn the subject very well, enough to have Mike at ITI say that Susan could teach one of their courses. And in the process we learn how our clients see themselves. The trick is being able to learn the “inside scoop” well enough to teach it and still keep a clean perspective.

Obviously, our perspective can never be as unfiltered as it was in the beginning of the relationship, but we work at staying  “on the outside looking in” as much as possible. We refer back to the “inventory” of our initial observations so we can merge this with the knowledge we gain from the inside to help keep our clients on track. This is a beautiful thing and helps create a long-term relationship with our clients.

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, was the speaker. He used a bare-bones slide deck which mostly consisted of keywords he wrote as he spoke (gad what happens when no one knows how to write in cursive anymore!). He discussed about the feelings shared by audiences and presenters alike that power point reduces the presenter to “reading the slides”.  Symptoms: a sensation that the presenter could have mailed in the presentation, a presenter feeling tethered to a presentation and losing spontaneity, unable to change direction when the audience requires it, etc., etc. 

Cliff’s antidote?

What was Cliff’s suggestion for change? Speaking from the heart rather than from the mind: emotion not data, connection not lists.  This is certainly not a new idea but what was different about Cliff’s idea what that he actually spelled out how this could be done. For example, Cliff has done this in a court room presentation (how do you distill 5000 documents into something accessible) and in a scientific forum where “just the facts and evidence” are expected. 

The Challenge

Cliff challenged his audience to dare to try this approach.  As he said, we have all suffered so long: “we are all boring each other to tears. We are all doing it the way we are doing it because that is the way we are doing it.  Sometimes it just takes courage to pull out the emotional stuff from all the quantitative information. Find the heart of the emotion of the decision that has to be made…..” 

He’s right that it will take courage to buck the expectation of the old way in favor of minimalism and a true connection. This is something that I am going to try….

This was the second in a series of Outstanding Presentation Workshops hosted and moderated by the very modest Helen Finkelstein. Thank you Helen! For more information and upcoming dates:   Helen Finkelstein).